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Monday, March 4, 2013

A Novella Accepted

Excitement of the week, the month, the year so far.
Timmi Duchamp at Aqueduct Press has officially bought my novella, "Spring In Geneva."
It’s a 25K word riff on Frankenstein in which the fictional life-creation experiment in the novel turns out real, masterminded by Byron and Percy Shelley, wanting to produce a superhuman (as in Percy Shelley's idea that poets legislate for the world.)
The story involves Mary Shelley in person, along with a rehabbed version of the Monster, a Swiss banker’s son, some steampunkish parts and a good deal of swash and buckle in the environs of Geneva. Byron has a cameo as the master-villain, in which he very nearly ran away with the whole story.
I had enormous fun writing this, not least because I got to use such outrageous cliches as "nether garments" and lines like, "'I have ruined all!'" There was also the swash and buckle: ambushes and sword-fights, Swiss bankers threatening Byron, and a hommage to Nikola Tesla as well as the author of Frankenstein itself.
The story will come out as a standalone novella in Aqueduct's Conversation Pieces line, in both print and e-versions, somewhere around August 2013. In the meantime, I hope to do a couple more blogs here, and maybe share around a couple of preview pieces. Just as a start, here's two of the pix I used for thinking points in the writing process.
Mont Blanc, a thematic if slight presence in the story, from Mont Saleve, which had a bigger part, just outside Geneva.

And Mary S herself, my favourite image of her, which I much prefer to the somewhat saccharine portrait with the books and black gear, painted around 1838. I haven't been able to find the provenance for this one, but it's clearly earlier, and it has a lot more steel showing than the later portrait.

This sketch more strongly suggests that she was a redoubtable lady, and I also had a lot of fun writing her like that.

I enjoy, result in I found exactly what I used to be looking for. You’ve ended my 4 day long hunt! God Bless you man. Have a nice day. ByeRegards from Young EntrepreneurTangki FiberglassJual Septic Tank

About Me

Sylvia lives in North Queensland and is an author of both fantasy and science fiction, usually set in analogue or outright Australian landscapes. Her novels include Everran's Bane, The Moving Water, The Red Country, Amberlight, Riversend, Source, and The Solitaire Ghost and The Time Seam, contemporary fantasy.